The Republican Party will not only survive the chaos on Capitol Hill concerning the question over who will become the next House Speaker after Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy backed out of the race, but it will thrive, GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson said Friday.
"I think it was a magnanimous gesture by Rep. McCarthy to step aside, recognizing that there was a lot of turmoil, and open the process up," Carson told
MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell on her noon news program, noting that there should be no rush to pick outgoing House Speaker John Boehner's successor.
"They get to make the rules and they can decide exactly how long they want to take, and do it the right way and make sure that there is some harmony and a functional unit."
Carson does like Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, who many in the party are pushing to enter the race, saying he considers him to be a "thoughtful individual."
"Hopefully he will decide that he wants to do this and will present his philosophy of leadership along with others, and they can make an intelligent decision," said Carson.
Meanwhile, the nation's debt limit ceiling is up against a Nov. 5 deadline, and Carson said if he was president, the matter wouldn't even be an issue.
"Long before we reach the deadline, I would have been saying we're not going to raise the debt limit," he told Mitchell. "I'm not going to sign anything that in any way increases our obligations. And what I would say is you know, there are 645 governmental agencies and sub-agencies and they all have budgets, and I would have long before we got to this stage been looking at that and looking at other things, because we always end up in the same situation."
Also in the wide-ranging interview, Carson spoke out against President Barack Obama's visit to Oregon and address over last week's school shooting, which many are protesting as a political move.
"I think he would probably encounter less resistance if he wasn't trying to politicize a tragedy like this," Carson said. "If he in fact extended the same kind of warmth and condolences in every situation,
Kate Steinle, for example, people who perhaps find tragedies in situations that are not aligned with his agenda, then it wouldn't look like politicization and I think he would have less resistance."
He also took the opportunity in the interview to set the record straight on comments he'd made about how he'd respond to a gunman, saying that many in the media did not include the context of the question, but instead characterized it as a criticism of the victims in Oregon.
"In a situation where you had a madman who was systematically assassinating people after asking them a question and they're all there waiting their turn, I would not wait my turn," Carson said.
"I would say let's do something, you know, attack, unless you have an easy method of escape, of course, you escape but assuming you don't have an easy method of escape, why would you just sit there and allow him to do that? I think average people with common sense understand that."
He also explained his
comments that the Holocaust and the rise of Adolf Hitler could have been prevented had the Nazi leader not banned guns.
"Not only the Jews, but the entire populace," Carson said. "This is a general pattern that you see before tyranny occurs."
The retired neurosurgeon also spoke about Hillary Clinton and her latest stances against the trade deal and the Keystone pipeline, and her call for tougher Wall Street regulation.
"It's all of these regulations that you want to impose that are creating a very difficult situation for poor people and for the middle class," he said he would tell her if he came face to face with her in a presidential debate.
He also defended Rupert Murdoch, who said in a recent interview that Obama has not acted as a "real" black president.
"It's not a matter of blackness," said Carson. "It's a matter of what are we going to do for the downtrodden in our society?"
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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